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While Harold Camping spends this week trying to wipe egg off his face after real-world events spectacularly falsified his prediction that the Christian rapture would occur on May 21, global warming alarmists are similarly trying to wipe egg off their faces after real-world events spectacularly falsified their predictions of an imminent polar ice rapture.

This week, a 1979 Palm Beach Post article resurfaced in which Steven Schneider, who for the past 30 years was one of the most prominent global warming alarmists, claimed the west Antarctic ice sheet could melt before the year 2000 and inundate American coastlines with up to 25 feet of sea level rise. Obviously, the west Antarctic ice sheet was not raptured away last century, and New Yorkers can still drive rather than swim to work.

If Steven Schneider was the only alarmist making spectacular – and spectacularly wrong – predictions about global warming and polar ice melt, then perhaps we could simply write it off as a single person who walked a little too far off the deep end. But spectacularly wrong global warming predictions, about polar ice and many other global warming-related issues, is par for the course for global warming alarmists.

Mark Serreze, a researcher with the federally funded National Snow and Ice Data Center, frightened the masses in June 2008 by claiming there was a 50-50 chance the North Pole would be ice-free in the upcoming summer. The media reported Serreze’s prediction with a frenzy rarely equaled even among media-created global warming scares. Adding fuel to the fire, global warming alarmists lined up in droves to add their John Hancock to Serreze’s claim. Many prominent alarmists even claimed Serreze was too conservative with his prediction.

For example, Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at England’s Cambridge University, told the June 27, 2008, London Independent, “People are expecting this [Arctic ice melt] to continue this year and it is likely to extend over the North Pole. It is quite likely that the North Pole will be exposed this summer – it’s not happened before.”

As it turned out, the North Pole never came close to melting, with the Arctic Ocean containing 1.65 million square miles of sea ice at its 2008 minimum.

Much like Camping is now claiming his May 21 Christian rapture prediction was essentially accurate, but that he was merely a few months off regarding the timetable (news alert: beware October 21, 2011!), the alarmists are now claiming their failed North Pole predictions were essentially accurate, but merely a few years off regarding the timetable. They now claim the Arctic Ocean will be essentially ice free by the year 2020 or 2030. Don’t bet on it.

Speaking of bets, I have contacted some of the people making such claims about an imminent polar ice rapture, asking them if they would like to place a wager with me regarding their prediction. It’s funny how they all seem to have misplaced their wallets.

The alarmists, moreover, have not confined their rapture predictions to polar ice.

The Star Chamber of global warming cartels, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), claimed in its most recent report that global warming is likely to rapture away the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. When investigators discovered there was no scientific evidence to support the claim, and a good deal of scientific evidence countering the claim, the rapture prediction was canceled.

The media spent much of the past decade parroting alarmist claims that global warming was shutting down the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Ocean Conveyor Belt. That rapture alarm has been canceled, too.

David Viner, a researcher at the University of East Anglia (UK) climatic research unit claimed in the year 2000 that within just a few years, “children just aren’t going to know what snow is” and snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event.” Here on this side of the pond, prominent alarmist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said essentially the same thing in 2008. The past two winters, however, were two of the snowiest in history. Real-world climate data, moreover, show annual snow extent is trending up, rather than down, in recent decades. So much for that predicted rapture, too.

The list of failed predictions regarding global warming raptures is no less extensive than the list of failed predictions regarding Christian church raptures. There is one important difference, however. The Harold Campings of the world reside outside the Christian mainstream. Among global warming alarmists, the serially wrong rapturists define the mainstream.